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Tuesday, February 24, 2015

There is
a name for it, this meandering existence: these blocks of concrete that line the
sidewalks; those checkpoints that shield our suicide bombers’ favorite spots; the
embassies impregnating themselves in the middle of bustling neighborhoods; the security
barriers that usher you in and out of no-go zones wringing the houses of
every other big chief.

There is
a name for it, this city center that shutters every time parliamentarians
convene under democracy’s dome to discuss nothing. Every time the families of
kidnapped soldiers set up tent to plead for answers from a government that has
none.

There is
a name for a city donning the ornaments of its dread.

Families of Kidnapped Soldiers Demonstrating
in BCD

Not so
long ago, Lebanon could boast alone this architecture
of siege, a battered mother of grand old metropolises that had become
unruly hubs of fear. Not anymore. In Sanaa, Tripoli and Benghazi; in Homs, Aleppo
and Damascus; in Basra, Karbala and Baghdad, is our frightened future in
pastiche. To each city, its own style and pace of degradation, it goes without
saying, but from all, we can be sure this is the saddest of farewells to
yesterday’s semblances of peace.

And still,
I’d like to pretend—really, I would—that this meandering existence brings an
absurd quality to my Beiruti life, but the absurd has long settled into run-of-the-mill.
Should a Jihadi explode in the Southern Suburbs, I pray for it as if another
country. Should Bab al Tebbeneh and Jabal Muhsin do battle across Syria Street
up north in Tripoli, I mourn it
as if another continent. Should an assassin’s target shatter around, for
example, Solidere’s STARCO, I fret. Shit! This is right up my alley.

Some dilemmas
refuse to die in this locale: which districts to shun, which cantons to avoid, which
roads to skip, cafes to hang out in—and not. When to stay down and put and when
to ignore the gunshots. For spooks and fly-by-night lovers this is such fun. For the rest of us, this
late in the game, the silly hype is all but moot.

This is
the way we are. The way we live. Checkered days in checkered cities in a checkered
country. Neither at war nor in
repose. Or as the Daily Star put it in a fleeting moment of eloquence, “Neither in
emergency nor in development mode.”

But as makeshift
and haphazard as they might appear, the architectural eyesores mark the surface of this withering state,
much like they would a brigand’s face. These blights and scars tell tales about lineal bad behavior and full-blown system failure. In fact, they’re
of a piece with the tattered politics we have come to wear so well.

Sunni-Alawite
collisions in Tripoli, terrorists hanging about freely in Sidon’s Ain al Helweh,
Hezbollah and Jihadis fighting it out in “peripheral” Qalamoun and
Arsal, the president’s empty chair even when he’s there…: these are just a few
of the particulars of a “Lebanon” in total disarray.

A Main Entrance to the City Center

And, of
course, with the roadblocks and barricades come battalions of steel and glass
skyscrapers laying waste
to our historical memory; greenery strewn for the populace, the way scrooges would
breadcrumbs to the hungry; traffic choking the arteries of a capital housing
literally half of this warring family; exorbitant electricity that lights up
only for the finest of Beirut…

Like
this, and forever, I can go on.

And so we
meander, at times furious, at others oblivious, going about our chores as best
we can, marveling at how well we are doing—considering. Art, we have. Plenty! Entrepreneurship
too. Promising startups spawning great products. Corruption is nearly
everywhere, true. But the book fairs dot the year and the music festivals turn
the summer into one happy sing
along.

Nada Sehnaoui's Haven't 15 years of Hiding in
Toilets Been Enough

They say
we are the incubator for the rest of the Arab world. I fear we could be, with replicas
outdoing the worst of our instincts. In 17 years of civil war, we sent 135,000
to their grave. Twelve and four years into their hell, Iraq and Syria, respectively, are
putting our body count to shame. Let’s see
in what other ways they will mimic us when they grow tired of all out slaughter
and opt for violence of the low-grade range.

In preparation for what awaits me in this metastasizing Levant,
I haven’t really been doing much, except watching the old order unraveling. No,
not Sykes-Picot and its boundaries, but the insides of postcolonial regimes that,
once upon a time, were all
embracing and all mighty.

I think
it was around 1992, barely a year after I had unpacked my bags in Ain al
Mreisseh, when I came to understand that—for all intents and purposes, and
bureaucratic formalities aside--my city is my country. Even those who still
rise when national anthems play and armies parade know that this mishmash of an enclave has
relinquished its monopolies on practically all levers of authority, sacrificing
with it any exclusive claim on
loyalty.

You could
say this is the Lebanese version of the Arab city-state rising, divvied up, cleansed,
shambolic and all but sovereign. Other collapsing realms in this region, no
doubt, have theirs.

This is
contagion in a nutshell--a sieving of a sort, as communities en masse escape
into safety among their kind. In its specifics, the future for far too many
innocent souls may be impossible to imagine, the experts warn, but already much
of what we are witnessing today is surely unimaginable.

Dubai,
you ask? Well, that’s the one, I suppose, against which we will forever be
juxtaposed when they cite outliers or conflicting regional trends. Dubai is one
hell of a story, I’ll admit. But every time I visit, I always find it very
balancing to remember the many in the dungeon when enjoying my time in the sun.

And, by
the way, if you are in search of material about what in the world is wrong with
the world, I recommend the latest book by Columbia University’s Saskia Sassen,
appropriately enough titled Expulsions.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Give it up! From this Arab neck
of the woods or not, how clueless do you feel?

I’ll be honest with you.
We’re running around like plucked chickens over here. We’d like to know more, a
hell of a lot more, in fact, the better to pace ourselves. And we certainly should
know better, we’ve been at it for so long. But fear, I am afraid, is a
contagion, and if there is an easy descriptor for the current disposition, it’s panic mode. Kind of like the feeling so many of us
Lebanese have when midway to the bathroom at 2 am, lights out.

Man of the year Caliph Abu
Bakr al Baghdadi has kindly offered us the latest proof that innovation can
come as naturally to Jihadis as it does to the feistiest business entrepreneur:
from the ashes of Iraq in 2007 to the killing fields of Syria post 2011; from
financial dependence on donors to a wheeling and dealing outfit racking up cash
from oil, ransoms, smuggling, extortion rackets; from a few thousand fighters
to anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000; from an Iraqi magnet for mostly Arab
recruits to a global outreach agency. From the fringes, as International Crisis
Group’s Peter Harling aptly puts it, to the heart
of the action.

Hard for the International
Community of Brotherhood now, like once upon a time, to surreptitiously snigger
while stamping Middle East only on
these harvests. Not so long ago, the West spectated as if behind tight-shut
gates. In this age of globalization, technology for all and multiculturalism partly
born out of decades of postcolonial
westbound migrations, it’s become a little too cozy for comfort,
although if you count the dead, it does seem like our side is by far way ahead.

But no matter, I am not one
to quibble over numbers. This is a certifiable
situation in our collective
nervous lap, and the time is now for, I don’t know, something or other.

First on the to-do list, the
profiling exercises to help the Western masses understand the nature of the wretched
beast. Even the New Scientist has given
its two cents on what could possibly motivate Western Jihadis. In this earnest
effort it joins every other news outlet and think tank.

You might want to consider
peer pressure, the magazine suggests, as “in young people hooking up with their
friends and going on a glorious mission.” And don’t be surprised if the fellows
are nursing some kind of a grudge against whomever or whatever. For The Economist’s Sarah Birke, you also
should never underestimate the knock-on effect of ennui and a muddled identity.
To The Daily Beast’s Christopher
Dickey, if you want to put your finger on at least a good chunk of it, you would need to fully internalize
the influence of idiocy in a thug
with an inflated ego. And, yes, an
inflated ego in an idiotic thug works just as well. Which flirts with Gautam
Malkani’s admonitionin The Financial Times--the closest to the
mark, in my opinion--that, “We really need to talk about lunacy.”

All necessary speculation, no doubt, but by
the fourth or fifth take you begin to get the sneaking feeling that the
profilers are not having an easy time with this one. And so, the reasons queue
up as if in tryouts for the lead in an unfolding tragedy. Sure, much of the
chatter is dramatic. But I don’t mind that so much. It’s the least observers
owe this cast of Jihadi tourists marauding across a backdrop of collapsing
states and dissolving borders, of black flags fluttering over conquered cities
and oil wells, severed heads held
up for photo ops, caliphs brandishing $25,000 Rolex watches while
preaching the plague from mosques. Of
all the narratives competing to fill in the blanks in the Middle East’s many
voids, this one, precisely because it is so fantastical and yet so close to
home, dominates the news, not to mention the policy rooms.

Fair enough. We get that. The
very intrepid journalist Hazem Ameen, who’s been on the trail of Jihadism for
many years, captures, in two recent pieces
in Al Hayat Newspaper, the Hollywood that Jihadi terrains have become for unhinged
foreign fantasists. These Book of Eli
deserts are where the imagined, however bizarre or hideous, can turn undeniably
real. What more riveting reads by Western reporters than these? And if by such
obsessiveness they inadvertently dress up weirdness as mainstream, it won’t be
the first time that perspective and nuance have been sacrificed thus in the
Middle East.

Not to be outdone, some of our own commentators have also taken to
painting with the broadest brushstrokes, none more sweeping than that of Al
Arabiya’s Hesham Melhem, who laments, “Is
it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs
to this self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the
Islamic State?”

Just like that, hundreds of
millions of Arabs, whose cities and daily routines and interests and culture
and dreams and hopes and ambitions and values don’t quite tally with this
macabre theater, are deemed beside the
point that is ISIS and its sisters and cousins. Not that I would ever want
to put down a man brooding about the sorry state of Arabhood, but if you want to write off an entire people, a good
majority of them barely past 18, surely the least you could do is tell them which
way is the fastest to oblivion.

And if this is, indeed, total
civilizational collapse we are experiencing, what’s the use of bringing the
widest lens in the shop to take in the whole wreck of a place if it demonstrably
lives in ever increasing fragments? Who knows, maybe the discordant pieces offer
vistas infinitely more intriguing than dust balls scampering through a haunted
Dodge City? To insist that the only reality that counts is the so-called
Islamic State without acknowledging (and then convincingly dismissing) the
shifting realities and trends that suffuse the huge expanse around and within
it is not a serious diagnosis but a howling of a sort.

You would think that, in
history this fast-paced, those who scratch their chin for a living would be
wise enough not to press stop for a snapshot. Where’s the fun, for heaven’s
sake, in freezing Clint Eastwood in the middle of a pistol-whipping?

It tells you something,
though, doesn’t it, that most gurus sobbing their way today through the page
barely two years ago were applauding the Arabs for finally “rising up and
joining history.”

Speaking of the underrated
beauty of perspective and the accidental benefits of slow thinking, Harling,
unmistakably the most astute Middle East analyst, rightly argues that ISIS is but
one of the progenies of a colossal century-long failure of practically every
ism in the house, including Islamism, matched only by the bankruptcy of
practically every single regime this side of the Mediterranean, including those
which are still standing.

In other words, the omnipresent
postcolonial Arab State has just
about dropped dead, the times are fluid and the vacuums are many. To Sunnis,
bereft of all the old ideologies and their promise, the sense of loss, in a
jarringly sectarian climate, is profound: “More and more Sunnis…experience and
express the feeling that they have been deprived of their fundamental rights
and are suffering persecution.” The community is “a majority with a minority
complex--a powerful though confused feeling of marginalisation dispossession
and humiliation.”

Iraq is gone; Syria, whole,
cannot be won; even the tiny Yazidi minority, when besieged, wins American
attention, while Sunnis in Syria continue to sustain huge losses on the hands
of—it has to be said--Alawite Bashar Assad and his Shiite Iranian allies.

It’s reached a point where
the staunch secularist Sadeq Jalal Al Azm, Syria’s preeminent intellectual,
resolutely declares,
“What is trampled underfoot in Syria right now is the majority and its rights,
about which no one seems to speak outside of Syria.” A longstanding vociferous
critic of Western interference, Azm goes on to demand that the West own up and
step forward: “The West does have a role to play. Instead of letting Syria
bleed, the West needs to help end Assad’s grip on the country and its future
and negotiate political accommodation for Alawis within a democratic framework that will necessarily favor the Sunni
majority” (my emphasis).

Provocative thoughts from
Azm, which brings me to the second chore on the to-do list: How to reconcile
this genuinely felt Sunni injury with the selfies with cutoff heads and burying
human beings alive as a rite of passage? More specifically, where do we exactly
place this testimony
by a repentant Turkish Jihadi in the current discourse on the region’s
geopolitics? “When
you fight over there, it’s like being in a trance…Everyone shouts, ‘God is the
greatest,’ which gives you divine strength to kill the enemy without being
fazed by blood or splattered guts.”

It isn’t only foreigners who
are stumped by the very short distance between injury and gruesome murder for the
slightest sin or offense. Even those who are sympathetic to ISIS’s calling
can’t quite figure out what to make of those heads rolling. So, what kind of
redress might work best for this specific expression of Sunni marginalization and dispossession? Because--and
I could be wrong, of course—it does all seem a bit over the top. And if it
isn’t, then what label dare we slap on it to bring it into the family of
run-of-the mill human obscenity?

For more perspective, let me
ask the question in blunter and simpler terms: Why are we all so unnerved
by ISIS and its particular brand of ire? Every corner of this earth claims
victims—and victors, for that matter--whose method of choice is violence. The
world over humanity brags
cruelties and injustices, many committed with unfathomable nonchalance, most
with a self-justified purpose. What’s so special, really, about Baghdadi et al?
How are they different from those manning Assad’s torture houses or dropping
his chlorine bombs? Or Samir Geagea and his countless killing sprees? Or the
Hutus who slaughtered
their way through 800,000 Tutsis over the course of three months? Or Israeli
soldiers who, with purposeful malice, force pregnant Palestinian women to wait
endlessly at the West Bank’s profuse checkpoints? Or the four men who, in 2012,
gang
raped to death a young woman on a New Delhi bus…?

I am picking them at random here,
because context is forever king and evil is so damn facile. Obviously, we can rewind
a little to everybody’s favorites: Saddam, Bokssa, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin… And
don’t tell me you that your eyes will roll if some contrarians in our midst
might at this stage mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What is it, then, about Baghdadi and his
men that makes them just too mad for our sensibilities? What makes this type of
evil versus all others too freaky? And when Bill Maher utters verdicts
like “The Muslim world… has too much in common with ISIS,” what is it about
this deviancy that renders it, for this poster boy of liberalism, so
emblematic of his batty world of
Muslims? To no avail, I’ve been wracking my brains for days trying to
remember the last time I heard a liberal Arab harrumphing about the “Christian
world.” What makes Islam so tricky that it trips up even the usually more
discerning among us?

More fundamentally, if you
will pardon the pun, what should we make of ordinary Sunnis—educated and not,
well off and not, intelligent and not, perfectly respectable and not, religious
and not—finding in a blatantly rapacious ISIS and other such like movements an
acceptable channel for grievance?

But then, how many times have
we found ourselves asking the same question about other moments, other reigns,
other terrors, that lit up places not even remotely related to Islam?

So for the last task on this
week’s to-do list, on a whim, I propose that you skip all conversations
profiling Western Jihadis, because, very quickly, they turn very silly. A
friend said the other evening that profilers have to go micro. Well, how micro,
I asked? Micro, micro, she answered. But then where’s the macro, I shot back.

See what I mean!

Once you’ve skipped this
exercise, go ahead and humor Ramzi Mardini of The Atlantic Council and declare
him right, when he argues
that the “Islamic State Threat Is Overstated;” that every strength ISIS boasts
feeds on the wrong politics surrounding it. And while you’re at it, be bold and
give Ameen and Harling the thumbs up, when they point out that the military
solution, even if well executed, is at best partial because the problem is,
alas, only partially military. Upsetting as these two glaringly obvious facts
are, you should embrace them because they will help ease the pain of policy
failures about to unravel right before your very eyes.

Since at this stage you would
be on a roll, resist whichever
way you can the temptation to lump together 1.6 billion Muslims or wave away
375 million Arabs by way of an answer just because you don’t have one.

Friday, August 8, 2014

Palestine, we all know, is a heartbreaker. The homes wrecked, the
lives spent, the hate fixed between neighbors, families and friends--and still
she devours a century on.

Through decades of bloodshed in her name, there have been a few---fools
mainly—who have wondered what the fuss is all about. Juxtapose her, they keep insisting,
against World War I and II and the hell they unleashed across continents, the
millions they killed, the wholesale population transfers they provoked. What
for, then, all this surely manufactured mayhem?

Others--fools, really—till this very day believe that if only
the Palestinians had been nice, Palestine would have been saved a paradise for all
her children, newcomers and millennium old alike. Here’s
Woody Allen’s eye-popping recent thoughts on the subject:

But I feel that the
Arabs were not very nice in the beginning, and that was a big problem. The Jews
had just come out of a terrible war where they were exterminated by the
millions and persecuted all over Europe, and they were given this tiny, tiny
piece of land in the desert. If the Arabs had just said, “Look, we know what
you guys have been through, take this little piece of land and we’ll all be
friends and help you,” and the Jews came in peace, but they didn’t. They were
not nice about it, and it led to problems…

And still Palestine confounds. Because she doesn’t just break
hearts, she cuts down heroes, infects dreams, turning them into nightmares
and—most consequential of all—she slays myths and mocks those who think they
can, as masters would their slaves, possess her.

For the longest time, as Israel looked contentedly on, it
seemed that only Arabs and Palestinians would fall at her altar. After all, we’re
the fantasists who, through innocence or idiocy, could not keep her. But, of
course, arrogance is its own kind of buffoonery. And would that it were just
the government of Netanyahu’s, then Israel’s supporters might be forgiven for
entertaining the faint possibility that her once magnificently woven script is
still salvageable. But it isn’t, and the implications for Israelis are nothing
short of earth shattering.

I refer here not to the clear breakdown in the European
consensus on Israel, although that matters. Nor do I have in my sight American
public opinion’s gradually less subtle questioning of Israel, although that
matters even more. Nor am I focused on the progressively louder soul searching within
the American Jewish community, although, eventually, that could well prove
vital. I am not even hinting at the thorny debate occupying
wider circles in the West—some earnest, others not--on how well Israel has done
in finally laying the Jewish
Question to rest.

I actually have in mind the disintegration of the extraordinary
dichotomies that Israel, at conception, had so painstakingly constructed in
order to impregnate herself against the damage wrought by her own actions. I
speak of the notion that Israel, Western bastion that she is supposed to be, belongs
in the Middle East but not to it;
that in system and culture she stands apart from—blatantly superior to--the
Arab Other; and with all the
exceptionalism these extend her, that she could proceed to lay absolute claim
to Palestine and crush the
Palestinians.

It is understandable for Israeli leaders to have thought that
they could get away with it, because they did up until 1967. It took such a
unique turn of events, a story so finely tuned, to make 1948 and the “resurrection of a nation” so impervious to the
catastrophe inflicted on another. Had a victorious Israel ceded the lands
conquered in the six-day war, the narrative is almost sure to have held. But
she didn’t, succumbing instead to her insatiable appetites--and, over 40 years,
the tearing
at, first and foremost, the very fabrics that knit
Israel into such perfect shape for all her lovers.

You want it in photos? Then put Avigdor Lieberman against the
legendary Abba Eban. You want it in the currency of hate? Try and argue the
difference between “death to the Arabs” and “death to Israel.” Bloodshed? Then
yours is the face of a dead child in Gaza right next to his twin in Aleppo. You
prefer zealous beards and their gibberish uttered in the name of God? By all
means, stop by the settled hilltops of the West Bank on your way to Zarqa in
Amman.

Of all the divides that Israel had erected to convey an acute
sense of her glorious, enlightened self, none stood grander than the one
between her and us barbarians pressing against her ever expanding borders. More
significantly, none, Israel believed, could be more effective in shielding her
on the inside from the fallout of her misdeeds on the outside. But ironically,
it is precisely this racist license that Israel had devised for herself (in the
European colonial tradition, as it were) that tricked her into thinking that
she could proceed, blessed and unshackled, to occupy, thieve and oppress
without so much as a trace on her body politic, her culture, her character, her
future.

The problem with Israel,
in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European ‘enclave’ in
the Arab world: but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a
characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that
has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international
law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish
religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever
excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an
anachronism.

You might be feeling the urge to widen the lens onto Syria, Yemen, Libya and
Iraq, for example, to provide kinder context for the Jewish state’s case. And I
would, in turn, thank you. The mere fact that you feel compelled to draw
attention to the bigotries of the neighborhood to dilute Israel’s makes exactly
my point.

In the end, only fairytales withstand the ravages of time. And
Israel is not one of them.

What now? Nothing--and everything. Beyond the immediate
spectacle of balloons deflating all around the Middle East, the coming years
are extremely hard to predict. Ours today is a wasteland of epic tales. There
is something cathartic about the experience, and something devastating as well.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Looking for an angle in the recent
Syrian presidential elections? You could marvel at Hassan Nassrallah’s pleadings (always in the style of I know
everything and you’re an idiot) to fully appreciate, grasp, buy, and then eat
up the full significance of a
shenanigan.

If that doesn’t work and you’re still desperate for some
insight that you are sure is hidden deep inside this silly story, then to you père
Assad.

Pick a day between 20 and 25, February 1985. A late afternoon
chat in Amman. I was sitting mute
(ok, and just a tad bit giddy) between a seasoned Lebanese journalist,
who worked then for a French outlet, and a wily Jordanian politician. Across
the border, Hafez Assad had just been reelected President of Syria with 99.4%
of the vote in a referendum for which an impeccable 100% of voters turned out.
Of course, it escaped no one
that this routine constitutional exercise came on the blood soaked heels of the
Hama Cleansing and years
of civil rumblings encouraged by internal failures and external nemeses.

The journalist, obviously oscillating between amusement and
bemusement, asked, “It’s bizarre this charade, no? How does Assad expect us to
take these ridiculous results seriously?” To which the good politician answered
with a wry smile, “ Ah, but that is precisely Assad’s point: that he could pull
off something this ridiculous--and with such ease so soon after all the
bloodshed.”

To one and all, the man was saying: I am in control.

I am paraphrasing, it goes without saying. And so is Bashar now.
It has been 29 years since that plebiscite. In the throes of an existential challenge
that has broken the son’s grip and the country’s back, presidential elections proceeded,
as commentators, oscillating between amusement and bemusement, cried foul.

For Bashar this
is nothing short of applause.He has just demonstrated that,
even under extreme duress, he can pull off an absolute farce; to boot, that he
can pull it off in an old, favorite fiefdom, rousing tens of thousands of “expats”
to throng the Syrian embassy in Lebanon to do their duty for Bashar w bass—Only Bashar.

But the mob
scene in Beirut still needed
a prop to deliver the full force of the stunt. In an arrangement
that is signature House of Assad, the embassy lined up three boxes, one for each candidate in curtain
free space, as if Bashar was giggling to one and all: I am still in
control.

But the undeniable fact is that he isn’t. If Hafez’s referendum
in 1985 was designed to show off his strength in a Syria united behind him,
Bashar’s elections were meant to camouflage weakness in a Syria divided all
around him.

You’re about to say he’s done well—considering. And you would
be right—kind of. Syria is gone, the man is but a fraction of his original size, but there is a growing
sense that his will be a voice in any future settlement. Increasingly, you come
across even the most anti-Assad die-hards who have quit because of the horrors
of the chaos, because of the unbearable sight of a nation dying, the forbidding
promise of Islamist extremism. And
perhaps because they finally caught up with the long established consensus between
enough of Assad’s friends and foes that the regime shall remain intact.

Alas, for all these “blessings,” Bashar owes a huge debt to a
long list of others. Sitting alone in his office, he could blow kisses every
which way the wind will take them. But no favor
has been more consequential for him and Syria than that extended by Hezbollah
and Iran, not only because it is the very one that saved his neck, but because
it is the very one with the most intriguing implications for the geopolitics of
the region.

How these implications will play out is, of course, an
important question for which a number of intertwining, booby trapped files lie in wait, only one of which is
titled The Arab Uprisings and the Dust They’ve Kicked Up From Sanaa’ to
Benghazi. Others you should keep in mind? Let’s see, first the big regional
folders: America
Does Iran; Is This A Shiite Crescent I Behold Or An Ignis Fatuus?; (click
on the link if this is the first time you come across this beauty); Regional
Models Are For The Birds, with the very helpful subheading of Let’s Not Talk Turkey & Only The
Southern Suburbs Want to Speak Farsi.

As for the local dossiers, they all, regrettably if inevitably,
end in a question mark: Please, Might Turkey Dump Erdogan? Who Will Keel Over
First, Second And Third In The Saudi Kingdom? Will Iran’s Theocracy Die In
Order To Live? Is Netanyahu The Gift That Keeps On Giving Or What?

Bashar, being Bashar, would have a mother of a file all his
own, but I am not altogether sure it is of any comfort for this former leader
of the former “pulse of Arabhood”: The Trials and Travails of A Master Turned
Pawn.

While working
your way through any of these recipes, here’s a piece of advice recently given
to me by one of the sharpest cooks in this mess of a kitchen: think a whole lot
of improvisation with only sprinkles of strategy.